"There are people who would write a check and die for her, but there are plenty of others who wouldn't vote for her if she promised to eliminate the income tax and give free ice cream to everyone. People have made up their minds about her, and that doesn't give her much room to maneuver."-- Dick Harpootlian, a former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party.

"People have gained a more complete view of Hillary in the Senate than they had when she was in the White House. People are getting past the cartoon version of her and seeing that she's culturally moderate and sensitive to rural and small-town America. That mix has always been a part of her."-- Mandy Grunwald, longtime adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Welcome to the "Is Hillary electable" conversation gripping the electoral-industrial complex - the polls, pundits, consultants, fundraisers and major donors that, as the Guardian's Gary Younge wrote in his monthly Nation column, "transform politics into a never-ending soap opera". That soap opera acquired new drama this past weekend as Senator Clinton shuttled between carefully organized meetings with top New York Democratic officials - including newly-elected Governor Eliot Spitzer.

According to one state official, these talks signaled she is likely to run for the presidency in 2008.

"Electability" has become political code for whether Hillary Rodham Clinton can woo enough swing states, independents and moderates to win in a general election. What's clear is she has the millions in the bank and a juggernaut of an advisory team. She's also a survivor - having spent a decade or more being beaten up - often viciously - by the media. Not only has she come out alive but she's clearly learned about how to fight back - as has her husband, often credited with being the party's best campaign strategist. (With the possible exception of Obama, he's also the Democrat's biggest fundraising draw.)

But the hardcore skeptic camp argues that she remains a highly polarising figure for many Americans - largely derived from her eight years as first lady, her leading role in the failed effort to fix the nation's health care system and her husband's scandal-plagued presidency.

The soft-core skeptics question whether America is really ready to elect a woman president. Supporters argue that Clinton's popularity with women voters - especially African-American women - could move some states that have been close in the past into the Democratic column (think Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio). Iconoclastic thinkers like Nation columnist Katha Pollitt argue that Hillary (HRC) just can't get no respect. That's the title of one of her recent columns; in it, Pollitt criticises some feminist activists and scholars for coming close to "holding Senator Clinton's femaleness against her...'expecting more' of women tacitly expecting less of men" - especially when it comes to issues of militarism and neoliberalism.

Then there's the vexing matter of polls, which show Hillary - in general election match-ups - besting every Republican but New York's ex-mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and Senator John McCain - who may well carry the baggage of calling for more troops to head into the murderous quagmire of Iraq.

And then there are polls which show that Senator Clinton would be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. But they confound by suggesting that a majority of Democrats would prefer to support other party leaders - former Vice-President Al Gore, former Senator John Edwards - or Senator Barack Obama, the wildly popular junior senator from Illinois. It now appears likely that Obama - described the other day by a former top adviser to President Bush as "the most interesting persona to appear on the political radar screen in decades" and "a walking, talking hope machine [who] may reshape American politics" - will make a run of it.

Why a former Bush adviser is talking up Obama is for another day's analysis, but what's known is that the charismatic mixed-race political figure - with the compelling personal story - is virtually untested in the ruthlessly tough day-to-day combat of a national campaign.

There's also the question - inescapable at the end of several ugly weeks in America, ones in which a well-known white comedian spewed racist slurs in a California comedy club, when a brutal shooting of a young black man in Queens has transfixed New York. and when new police brutality charges are flying in LA - of whether, as Benjamin Wells-Wallace asked in a Washington Post article last month: is America too racist for Barack? Wells-Wallace argues that "whatever racism exists in this country, it coexists with a galloping desire to put that old race stuff behind us, to have a national Goodbye to All That moment." Obama speaks to this, he writes, "symbolizing the possibility of a more modern America."

Of course, speculation about Hillary's electability in 2008 has to take into account the minor detail of who her opponent turns out to be, as well as the large unknown about what the climate of the country and electorate will be.